Philosophy 361 Ethics Darwall Fall 1997
META-ETHICS I: NATURALISM
I Recall the distinction made in the first lecture between metaethics and normative
ethics. Roughly: Normative ethics concerns questions like: What is good? What is
right? What is the test of right and wrong? Metaethics concerns philosophical issues
about ethics. What is goodness or value?
II We can put one basic metaphysical issues in the form of a dilemma.
A. From the inside, ethical convictions purport to be objective. Compare, for
example, the belief that it is wrong to cause gratuitous harm to innocents, with a
preference for a flavor of ice cream. These seem different. When people disagree
about the latter, they can see this as disagreement in taste, but not in the former case.
If someone were to judge that there is nothing wrong in harming innocents, we are
likely to think this judgment is mistaken.
Note that this doesn't mean that we think ourselves infallible. To the
contrary. The issue of fallibility doesn't even arise in matters of brute difference of
taste. It is because our ethical judgments purport to be true that we can take seriously
the possibility that we are mistaken.
B. On the other hand, it can be hard to see what could make ethical beliefs
true or false, what their truth or falsity could consist in. Harman raises this problem
in the following way.
Harman's Problem. In science, we confirm theories by seeing whether their
predictions correspond to experience. If we observe what the theory predicts, we take
this as evidence for the theory.
This might already seem a contrast with ethics. What functions as
observations in ethics? Why not intuitive ethical convictions?
We might think that this differs from science because intuitive ethical
judgments are already "infected" with theory. But neither is it the case in science that
observations are "theory neutral."
The real probem, Harman says, is that there is a further difference. In science
we take not just what we observe, but also our observing it, to be explained by the
theory, and this gives us reason to take our observation as evidence for the truth of
the theory. Harman's challenge: nothing like this is true in ethics.
Examples
III Fundamental Dilemma of Metaethics: Either ethical convictions can be true
(as they seem from the inside) or they cannot be. If they can, what can make them
true? In what does their truth consist? If they cannot be, then why do we think, feel,
and talk as though they can?
IV NATURALISM. One response to these issues is naturalism. The ethical
naturalist holds that ethical propositions can indeed be true, and that is because ethical
properties are themselves really natural properties. What properties are natural
properties? Most uncontroversially, any that we can discover by empirical
investigation.
There are basically two kinds of naturalist position: reductive naturalism and
nonreductive naturalism.
Reductive naturalism holds that ethical properties are identical to properties
that can be identified with the vocabulary of the empirical sciences or empircal "folk
theory". For example, the position that value is the property of being desired. Would
be a form of reductive naturalism.
Nonreductive naturalism holds that ethical properties are natural, even though
they can't be "reduced" to those identifiable through other such vocabularies. It may
be that ethical properties can only be referred to be ethical terms, but nonetheless be
true that ethical properties are natural properties.
Question: Is Mill a naturalist? If so, what sort is he?
Faced with Harman's contrast above, one tack open to the naturalist is to hold
that value and morality are real aspects of the world that really do explain things.
Thus, the naturalist might say, our ethical convictions may indeed be explained
by the (natural) ethical facts. The challenge is to make this position plausible.
V A problem for naturalism advanced by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903):.
Take any natural property you please--e.g., being desired or being pleasant. It would
seem that there could still be a dispute between two individuals who agree that a thing
has that property, but disagree about whether it is good. What is this dispute about?
If it is really about whether the thing is good, then goodness apparently cannot be the
same as the natural property we initially took, since there is no dispute about whether
the thing has that property. So, the arugment concludes, ethical naturalism is false.
Goodness is not any aspect of nature. [n.b. if this argument works, it presumably
also works against the idea that goodness is a supernatural property.]
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Text Analysis Project Assignment for 10/1: Harman, NM, pp. 41-46.
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